October 21 to 23, 2011

UC Berkeley, California

A culmination of the brightest Drupal minds in the technology hub of the world

1500

attending

Powering Drupal with nginx (Engine-X)

The world of high-performance tuning is getting turned on its head by this new(-ish) entrant into the world of web servers and reverse proxy caches. nginx (pronounced "Engine-X") is an unusual beast because it serves as both a reverse-proxy cache (similar to Varnish) and as a web server (similar to Apache).

nginx has a few advantages over other high-performance software out there. Its lower level of resource requirements lets you serve more pages with less processor power and memory usage. It's capable of high-performance SSL, meaning you can make a secure experience for your authenticated users. And it includes many of the conveniences of other reverse-proxy cache software such as silly-fast static file delivery and variable expiration of dynamic content for anonymous users.

This session will also cover a short comparison between nginx and other solutions such as nginx vs. Apache and nginx vs. Varnish (with an Apache back-end). As you might expect, nginx requires that you have a hosting provider that supports it or that you have root access to a server (virtual or physical).